


Answers and Questions

by athenaiskarthagonensis



Category: Good Omens (TV)
Genre: Asking Questions, Good and Evil, M/M, Philosophy
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-07-21
Updated: 2019-07-21
Packaged: 2020-07-10 07:05:00
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,785
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19901752
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/athenaiskarthagonensis/pseuds/athenaiskarthagonensis
Summary: Adam finds out that sometimes, asking questions can get you into trouble. Crowley knows exactly where he's coming from.





	Answers and Questions

It hadn’t taken too very long for Aziraphale and Crowley to figure out that the Antichrist wasn’t _precisely_ a normal little boy, despite the changes he’d made to his own reality.[1]

It also hadn’t taken them long to figure out that when Adam wanted to talk to them, they’d know it. There was… a sort of tug. Gentle, but there, and quite hard to resist… not that they wanted to. In fact, both of them quite liked Adam, Crowley because he liked all kids, who were, after all, major agents of minor chaos; and Aziraphale because Adam was old enough to hold a proper conversation with, yet young enough to retain a certain bright intellectual curiosity and open-mindedness too often worn out of children by the time they entered adolescence.[2]

And anyway, both of them were well aware that they hadn’t done the best job in raising young Warlock; they’d had motives other than the young man’s best interests at heart at the time, of course. Saving the world had been a worthy enough goal whether one considered it to be thwarting the wiles of the Enemy -- Aziraphale -- or purely selfish because, as it turned out, the world was where you actually _lived_ \-- Crowley. Caught between their efforts, the benign neglect of his socialite mother, and the sporadic but well-meaning attempts of his father to interest him in such appropriately manly pursuits as baseball, the stock exchange, and the charring of large amounts of meat on an outdoor cooking apparatus, it was little wonder Warlock had grown up no better than he ought to be.

Adam represented something of a second chance for Crowley and Aziraphale.

So it was fortunate for all involved that the drive between Tadfield and the South Downs cottage shared by the angel and the demon was not a very lengthy one to start with, and it was made even shorter by the fact that Crowley tended to treat things like posted speed limits and directional signage as at worst optional and at best as applying only to other people.[3]

The tyres were smoking slightly by the time Crowley had pulled the Bentley up to the kerb; hopping out, he gave them a very _significant_ look through his glasses and, rather sheepishly it seemed, the smoking petered out and stopped. Nasty habit, anyway; but the car didn’t have _very_ many ways of protesting the hard use to which its demonic owner occasionally put it. Crowley quite approved of minor rebellions, however, finding them generally endearing as long as they weren’t too personally inconvenient for him. (In that, he was nearly indistinguishable from the majority of cat owners.)

Aziraphale trailed his fingers lightly along the car’s warm side as he joined Crowley on the pavement, thinking to himself what an improvement the vehicle was over horses; the Bentley, appreciating the attention, shuddered slightly as it ticked and cooled.

“What do you think he wants this time, my dear?” asked the angel. He made a slight face as they fell in, wandering together down the lane in the direction of that psychic call. “I do hope he hasn’t called us all the way here just for help with his homework again.”

“Right-o,” agreed Crowley, sloping lankily along… or perhaps loping snakily. “Bit embarrassing, last time, having to admit I’d slept right through the entire Peloponnesian War.”

Aziraphale cast his eyes heavenward in a theatrical sort of way. “Oh, please. It was _far_ worse when he asked for help with French and I bumbled my way through the simplest sentences!”

“Oh, I don’t know,” temporized Crowley with a sidelong look. “That vocabulary lesson you gave will come in quite handy if he ever needs to order a four-course meal at the _Pavillon Ledoyen_ , I should think.”

Thus bantering with the easy familiarity engendered by centuries, the two soon stumbled upon the young man himself. Unlike other occasions, they found Adam neither in his own back garden nor in the Them’s personal wooded fortress; he had instead tossed himself with the boneless unconcern of childhood at the base of a gnarled old apple tree with his dog beside him, as usual. It was too early in the season for there to be anything but pale pinky-white blossoms adorning the twisted limbs; nevertheless, a low-hanging branch sported two bright apples blushing at their own prematurity. A third was being noisily consumed by the young man lying on his back with knees bent and head pillowed on a twist of root.

Adam sat up. There were apple blossoms caught in the thick mop of his muddy-gold curls; crowned by spring sunshine, he might have been a quite young Apollo, or a somewhat older than usual _putto_. He had also, to judge by the tracks still staining his cheeks, recently been crying.

“Are you all right, dear boy?” Aziraphale exclaimed at once. Beside him, the temperature rose very slightly around a visibly agitated Crowley, who was, after all, a creature native to the flame.[4]

“ _Yeah_ ,” said Adam with a certain boyish stubbornness, scrubbing at his cheeks with the back of one hand in an effort to hide the fact that he’d been crying at all. The set of his expression was a mulish one, the expression, both angel and demon decided independently of one another, of a young man whose tears were born out of frustration or anger rather than pain or grief.

“All right then, who needs a few demonic miracles sprinkled around, hey?” Crowley asked. His tone was cheery but his sharp features were hard in a way which reminded one that whatever else could be said of them, snakes were predators.

“Nobody,” Adam answered, but there was still that certain sullenness which told both entities, ethereal and occult alike, the boy wasn’t close to finished. Only a moment later, in fact, he burst out, “Only, there’s this new teacher in my school, and it’s not _fair_ , her giving me detention, I was only _asking_.”

Aziraphale and Crowley exchanged a glance. The angel was the first to speak. “Well, there are indeed many things in life which aren’t fair,” he agreed carefully. “But there’s obviously a difference between, well, things which can be _made_ fair, and… random….”

“Acts of God?” Crowley interjected laconically, and Aziraphale shot him an annoyed look.

“I was going to say _random chance_ ,” Aziraphale huffed. “The unpreventable sorts of things. But the point actually _is_ , you understand, that accepting the consequences for your actions isn’t actually _unfair_ , merely because you wish you didn’t have to. If you’ve disobeyed….” He paused, perhaps realizing how little solid ground he had to stand on in making a comment like that one. It was a good thing angels had wings; bravely, Aziraphale metaphorically leapt off the metaphorical ground and hovered there, trying again. “If you’ve disobeyed a legitimate authority whose rules are, well, _legitimate_ , and designed with your best interests genuinely at heart, and….”

Crowley could only take so much of this, hearing in it all the myriad (self) justifications his angel had used for centuries himself. There were some decent points buried in it all, but regardless… he turned to the angel and, rather gently, said, “Aziraphale. Shhh.” Looking back at Adam, he asked, “Right, what actually _happened_ , Adam?”

Adam’s brows, which had drawn together quite ominously while Aziraphale stammered about authorities, smoothed out the slightest bit. “We have this _stupid_ old textbook, it was published in, I don’t know, _the dark ages_ or something, and I don’t think it’s right. There’s things in it that I’m sure aren’t so. It says Atlantis isn’t even really real, for one thing. But we were reading the bits about King Arthur, and it says _he_ wasn’t really real, but I _know_ he was, because _you_ said he was. I told her all about how you were knights once and she told me to stop making things up and that history class wasn’t a game and I should leave off with the _imagination_ . And anyway I was only _asking_ the teacher why the book can say things that aren’t so, and she said I ask too many questions and I was a naughty child who should just accept what he was taught by his elders-and-betters and I asked _why_ because it wasn’t right and also Anathema says education should be all _about_ asking questions and then I had detention and it isn’t _fair_ at all!”

After this quite lengthy and somewhat rambling but quite heartfelt diatribe, the boy fell silent again but his shoulders were heaving and his face had reddened a bit as all that youthful frustration built up in him. Dog caught his master’s mood and barked once, a warning sort of yip which had a very slight reminder of “hellhound” buried in its complex little waveforms.

Aziraphale cast a look at his companion, not the least bit surprised to see signs of strain in the demon’s expression. “Why don’t you handle this one, my dear?” he suggested very gently. “It seems rather your sort of thing. I’ll just pop on by to visit Anathema; she’ll likely have some biscuits laid by, or perhaps a bit of cake.”[5]

Crowley didn’t respond, and didn’t really seem to even notice as Aziraphale tactfully withdrew. 

The demon stared at the Antichrist. The Antichrist, who was really only a young boy, stared back. And then Crowley removed his sunglasses, folding in their temples and slipping them into the inner pocket of his jacket. He blinked, more because humans expected it than because he actually needed to, and folded up his long legs in a complex movement which somehow rather reminded one more of something coiling up than sitting down.

“First thing,” Crowley said, “first thing is, no one knows everything there is to know, right?”

“What about --?” Adam started, but Crowley anticipated him.

“Nahhhh, not even Her, I sometimes think,” Crowley said, jerking his head in a generally upwards direction. “And if She does, she isn’t telling anyone. Not _all_ of it. But there’s this theory I’ve heard before, that the whole universe is just God’s way of finding out everything about Herself. And that’d mean that you, and I, and Ziraphale, and all the other angels, and all the demons, and all the humans… are just little bits chipped off the big bit, y’see, and when we die we go back and She finds out a little more about Herself.”

Adam paused and considered this. “Nah,” he said finally. “That sounds daft!”

The demon barked a laugh. “Too right. But thing is, the thing _is_ , Adam, it makes as much sense as any of the other theories, and a far sight more than some. The thing is, _we don’t know_.”

“Not even you?” Adam asked slowly. “Or the angels? None of you?”

Crowley shook his head. “Nope. None of us. Oh, the angels _think_ they know; damn self-righteous pricks, every last one of them…. Or, well, _almost_ every. But they only know what they’ve been told. They never stopped to question it.”

“Not like the demons did,” Adam said, with the satisfied air of someone who’d only just figured out a particularly puzzling word problem.

“Nahhhh,” said Crowley. “Most of that lot, they only questioned being told what to _do_ , not really what they were told to _think_ . They Fell mostly because they just didn’t want to obey. Well, maybe _Satan_ … but, no, y’know, better to rule in Hell, all that.”

Adam shook his head. His expression was frustrated again, his _putto_ features all screwed up menacingly, promising a bit of a tantrum. “I don’t _understand_ ,” he complained.

And Crowley smiled. “That’s where it all starts!” he declared.

“ _What does?_ ” Adam demanded, his blue eyes flashing.

“Before you can understand, lad, you have to _not_ understand. But you have to _want_ to,” Crowley said. “Which means you have to ask questions, even when people tell you to stop thinking for yourself and just think what they tell you to think. Oh, some of it’s right, like, oooh, two plus two, and all that, though there’s been philosophers who’ve debated that one too.”[6] Crowley gave a complicated sort of shrug. “But some’s a little more... up for grabs. It’s the thinking about it that matters. It’s the questions, but it’s also the trying to find answers. You question God, you question yourself, you question the world.”

“Then why do I even have to go to school at all?” Adam asked, still sullen, but the reddish sparks Crowley’d glimpsed in his eyes were gone. “If no one knows anything, anyway.”

“Because school’s where they teach you _how_ to think,” Crowley said. “Least, it’s meant to be. You have to know how to do that before you can do all the rest. And a good teacher, an actually good one, will _want_ you to ask questions.” He made a derisive sort of sound. “Sounds like this new teacher of yours is the other sort. You’re going to meet a lot of those, too. Part of the whole _ineffable_ thing is, people come in all sorts and types, and some of them are right arseholes. Sometimes, ‘on the side of the angels’ doesn’t mean the same thing as good; it just means they’ll only decide you’re good if you do as you’re told and think what they think.”

“How do I tell the difference?”

“Welllll, that’s a tough one sometimes,” Crowley agreed. “Best I’ve ever figured is, you can tell from what they actually do, not what they say they do. But the tricky bit is, sometimes the same person can do really good things and really bad things, sometimes even on the same day. Everyone just has to figure it out for themselves, as they go along. And sometimes that means getting detention.” Or falling into Hell. “And, no, it’s not fair. Not a bit of it.”

“That’s _not_ very comforting,” Adam said after a minute.

“Oh, isn’t it? I didn’t know I was meant to be _comforting_ you,” Crowley said, tossing up his hands. “Here I sit, sharing the accumulated knowledge of six thousand years and _you’d_ prefer the sort of comforting pablum spoon-fed to children in those horribly wholesome little after-school specials!” His voice twisted up in a mocking tone on the final words, and Adam blinked in surprise. “Are you angry it’s not fair? Are you really _pissed off?_ Then that’s a start, too. Maybe you can’t do much yet; you’re still a kid, after all. But not much isn’t the same as nothing. And the more you do, the more you _can_ do. That’s how you save the world. One thing at a time.”

Adam blinked again, but Crowley could see the boy was thinking about it. “Come on, then; Aziraphale said something about cake, I think,” Crowley said after a moment, standing and pulling Adam up after him.

“Well, yeah, but it’ll be _healthy_ cake,” said Adam at once, making a little face. 

Crowley winked. “Nahhh, it’ll be a snap to fix that one,” he said, starting off in the direction of the cottage Anathema had moved herself into and never back out of. “What else are demonic miracles good for, if not that sort of thing? Incidentally, speaking of, I don’t suppose you know this teacher’s address…? Just pure curiosity, you understand....”

* * *

1Honestly, what imaginative child, given world-altering powers, wouldn’t have kept at least a few of them? It was, after all, rather like being a superhero. And it was odds-on, in any case, that Adam’s mother had not been a daughter of Eve. More likely, she’d been a daughter of Lilith. Or perhaps Shub-Niggurath.

2The lucky ones get it back in their university years. The unlucky ones are, by and large, currently holding high-ranking positions in the government.

3Breaking the law, even in quite minor ways, was a sort of evil; Crowley might not work for the home office any more but he still kept up a sort of low-grade disobedience, partly out of habit and partly just to keep his hand in.

4Despite being also, in point of fact, coldblooded. Don’t ask how that works; it’s ineffable.

5Knowing Anathema, it would be _healthy_ cake, which is to say it would be as dense as half-cured cement and probably with carob in; but Aziraphale was not so much a gourmet as he was a gourmand. When it came to cake, he didn’t discriminate.

6The question revolves around whether, considered in a realm of pure ideas, such seeming facts as two plus two equals four may have no reality outside the mind. But as philosophical ideas go, that one’s putting Descartes before the horse


End file.
